


a simple migration

by beforeallthis



Category: Damnation (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-17 01:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13648887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beforeallthis/pseuds/beforeallthis
Summary: Request: Bessie and Creeley. "I'm pregnant."





	a simple migration

They ride silently, side by side – her and the Sheriff. There’s an early morning mist hovering over the ground, or is it just from the aftermath of the rifles fired and the blood sprayed into the twilight air?

The chatter amongst the farmers dies out abruptly as Berryman kills the engine. She lets him take the lead, waiting for him to get out before she decides to step out herself. And then she spots him in the crowd, and then he’s walking towards her. He steps away from the line, from his brother’s side and walks towards her. Is that a skip in his step? How surreal, amongst the dead bodies of traitors. Of patriots. Murderous tyrants. And then the poor. Fending for not just themselves, but for anyone _but_ themselves.

It takes some effort to restrain her own excitement at the sight of him, the sight of him alive and well. He walks past the Sheriff and neither of them spare each other a breath; the corner of his mouth is slanted in a lop-sided smile. Her effort falters then and she can only smile back at him. She distantly scolds herself given that they’re standing on what was a war ground only a few hours ago. But who cared for her then.

She has something to say, something she’s not sure she can ever bring herself to.

He reaches her, a broad chest and a wall between them that they can’t reach through – not out here. Instead, she looks up at him through her lashes, the smile sitting polite and proper on her face. No one would know any different.

“Hey,” he says, glancing behind him for a second.

“Hey,” she returns. Her feet shuffle forward, bringing them closer. And they know they’ll never be close enough to touch each other, to know each other. For now, not outside. Not outside without consequences, anyway.

A sick sort of feeling sits tightly in her gut. Sickly sweet. Fucking nauseating.

“How’d you sleep last night?” he asks, and she pushes the feeling away.

“Like a log, you?” she replies, and it’s as if the words she should be saying build up in her jaw - a heavy tension. The words she needs to be saying are wiring her teeth together.

“Oh, you know, likewise,” _you know._ Yeah, she’d know. He pauses and his smirk slants further. “I had the strangest dreams, though.”

It feels like she’s going to throw up right this fucking instant.

Instead, she clenches her teeth and nearly bites through her tongue as she pulls out the paper crumpled deep in her pocket and hands it to him.

“Does that chapel look familiar to you?”

He looks down and his smile fades away.

“It’s Colton Creek.”

He talks some and she absorbs herself completely in it until they part ways and she still hasn’t said what she wanted to. She doesn’t _want_ to have to say it. But this is where they find themselves, in an awful accident. His brother is standing in the distance and he looks like a ghost in the mist, still and frightened. Suddenly, she is miles away from everything and she finds herself standing on her own.

She walks through wet mud back to the car and waits inside. Unnaturally, it feels like something is moving inside her. Which she knows to be untrue. But soon, it’ll be all too real.

* * *

 

By night, she’s already thrown up twice. It doesn’t show on her, though. She still looks the way any other girl around here would look. Splashing her face with cold water, she watches it drip off her face in the dirty mirror, trying to catch her breath. She never bothered to clean it, only because it would stand out too much in the muck of it all. 

She walks out into her room, which is musty and suffocating, and that wretched fucking bed is waiting for her. It's enough to make her sick all over again. So, she opens a window and pulls out a bag. Her things are few, but they fit neatly together. And they’re enough.

She recognises his footsteps before he actually comes in.

Things suddenly don’t seem so bad when he stands there and doesn’t give the packing a second glance. Instead, he tells her that it’s a good idea. He’s buzzing with something, a mixture of excitement and a need to get away. The _need_ does not seem glaringly comforting, though. She has her own worries.

Maybe now would be the time to tell him. Or should she wait until they’re miles and miles away from this hellish town? Would he still stick with her then? Like it wasn’t surreal enough that they would be running away together like they stood a chance at all. But, it felt like they could, together, right now. And maybe, just maybe…

“Where we gonna go?” she throws at him while she neatly folds the dress he gave her, feeling it through with her fingers - she never could really get enough of it. She hums, amused, and happy, if she lets herself be. “Tahiti? Toledo? Tucumcari?” This is what those ordinary women get with their beaus. Trying it on for size for a fraction of a second is not something new in this line of work, but the idea of it not being an act, and actually being free from this place is almost too overwhelming to believe in. And so, accordingly, she doesn’t.

Something wrong is always bound to happen. Especially now.

Oh, they were begging for it.

“Doesn’t matter,” he is full of bad electricity, shuffling on his feet and not doing much but being nervous. “We just gotta get outta here as fast as possible,” there isn't a single breath in that sentence.

They were begging for it so _fucking bad_ that trouble literally showed up. And he's polite enough to knock.

Creeley stops shaking and stands up straight and frozen, stuck to the ground, his feet neatly lined up together. It happens too fast for her to put away her bag and she backs away towards the window on instinct.

The man who comes in speaks clearly and yet she doesn't try to hear him because she already knows what this is; there’s a back and forth recognition between him and Creeley before he turns to her and calls her _young miss._ Which isn’t too unusual around these parts, within these walls, where men speak this way but shed it all behind the door along with enough of their money for every woman to let it slide. But there’s something frightening about this man, his eyes are cat-like as he looks at her. For her, _young miss_ is rarely reserved for her. She doesn’t know if she can’t speak, or if she fully knows it won’t be smart to. She's not sure she wants to speak to him.

Creeley doesn’t give her a chance.

There’s that sick feeling again in her stomach, only comforted by the fact that he awkwardly stutters over the word as he’s calling her by it. He knows what he has to do, but he looks at her like it didn’t hurt him enough to say it in the first place. The mix of disbelief and resignation that she gives back to him makes his scars twinge – he’s earned himself another one, with no one dead on the floor.

He starts shaking again and tells her to leave - she doesn’t move. He tells himself he’s trying to protect her, which is not entirely untrue. Only that she knows that he’s also trying to protect himself.

That’s fair coming from a man imprisoned behind cell bars and outside them, too.

Her stomach lurches, and she figures she no longer fits in this equation. There’s an awkward air in the room, now. Everyone is waiting on them.

“I said, git! Whore!” it rolls that much easier off his tongue this time around that it throws him. He can't look at her then, his eyes flit between everything in the room before they land on his boots. The sheer volume of it makes her jump. There’s no air in the room and she runs out, not brushing past him. The door shuts so quietly behind her, her bag left open on the bed.

* * *

 

She walks around a town that hates her, and, _god_ , does she hate it back. Her entire existence in this place was about her leaving it. And it hurts, how close she came. But she got greedy. Love makes people greedy, makes them foolish.

God, was this love?

Hating herself for even thinking it, she can only feel her jaw clench harder as the reasons seem to grow. She feels stupid for ever hoping to leave; it was practical, at first. But there were no promises that leaving would grant her _anything_.

Then she reminds herself that Berryman gave her that chance to leave only earlier in the week and, oh, does she fucking hate herself then; for throwing that away for a man who could be dead in her room right now, or who could leave them in the dead of night to never be seen again. Or who would hear that there was a _them_ now and decide to deal with it his own way. She’d convinced herself that he was softer than he let on – what he let on being a ruthless mercenary with a flair for dramatic murderous stunts – and Bessie realises there’s still a lot she doesn’t know about Creeley Turner. And then there’s more that Creeley doesn’t know about Bessie Louvin. She’s not sure she cared much, in the lazy times they lingered around each other in that room. But he wouldn’t have minded if she sat and told him everything about her with his fingers circling idly on her skin. But he never said that to her. And he never asked.

He wanted to be a teacher, but he didn't even know how to read. His brother, a preacher behind a revolution, framed him for murders - plural. The locket sitting on her chest was his mother’s. He has a pattern of scars on his sides, some done by his own hand, a few by hers. Each one hurts the same.

And he knows her father is the white Sheriff of these parts. She told him for leverage.

It’s a strange feeling to miss her father. But she does.

And she misses the distant memory of her mother, and the record sitting in her bag, in that room.

After walking around in circles, she wipes her face, not really aware of the fact she had been crying. What’s one more hope, one more dream in this mess of things? She chances it with a hand on her stomach and a stronger resolve as she makes her way back in the cold chill of night.

Maybe Creeley finds the freedom he wants, deserves. Maybe he stays under people’s soft, unbruised, punishing hands for the rest of his life. If that’s the way he likes it, he can keep it. She wouldn’t want to take that from him. But most of all, she hopes that he finds peace, even if he finds it in the blood he keeps spilling.

Peace? It sounds nice, it sounded nice. She’s not sure wants it much anymore. She wouldn’t know what to do with it. But then she reminds herself that she’s thinking for two, now. The baby deserves a better lifetime than either of them ever had, and a town better than this one to match. They deserves parents who love them, with a tender touch and not the strap of the belt or the heel of a boot. Parents who stay. But that’s not always up to them.

The floor of the brothel creaks in that all-too-familiar way underneath her. But besides that, it’s quiet. The girls lounging around are solemn and silent; they don’t even look her way.

As she had hoped, her room is empty, the door left wide open and the curtains swaying with the breeze. Her bag is just how she left it. From between her neatly folded clothes, she pulls out the record and holds it like she’s seeing it for the first time, as though it might conjure her mother right in front of her, in the flesh. It doesn’t.

Instead, she puts it on and pushes her bag off the bed, sitting in the empty place. She looks down at her flat stomach, and her mother's voice is filling the room. This feels like a disaster. Her lip quivers and her chest feels like its going to explode all over again.

There are those footsteps again. The ones she knows.

She doesn’t look at him. He stops for a second, hesitant and questioning whether they’re still allowed this. The bag is gone, and it stings. They were supposed to get away. This is his fault.

Creeley Turner was always a scared little boy. Only now that he’s older, he had played – killed – enough people to make them think otherwise. But here, with her, she knows him.

He treads lightly, inching towards her like he doesn’t want to harm her anymore than he already has. The voice playing from the record is telling a story that is enchanting and heart-wrenching all at once. The bed creaks under him as he sits by her side. They can’t be much closer than they are right now, and he thinks she must hate it. Who is he to blame her? Only the man who promised her something and then took it away from her, violently.

His father taught him how to say sorry, hundreds and hundreds of times, violently.

But her sitting there like that, so quiet and so still. He’d never seen acceptance like this, and he hesitates to call it forgiveness.

Slowly, he takes off his glove and hopes his hand is warm enough. He grips her own hand, and the boy inside him expects a brutal and bloody backlash. Nothing of the sort happens, but something does happen. She just can’t stop herself then. The tears fall in streams but not a sound escapes her. Resting her head on his shoulder, he leans into it – this is a feeling he does not know, a new situation. Perhaps it is for her, too.

They stay like that for a while, just resting against each other. The music – that beautiful voice – stops, and he only hears a whimper from Bessie.

“I’m pregnant.”

Nothing changes. It’s so quiet that he almost thinks he imagined it, a breath of air from outside playing tricks with his hearing. Nothing happens, to her own surprise. Time stops, and he doesn't question it. There is a warmth inside him and in equal measure, something fighting it forcefully. The utterance of her words only cemented the fact that they would always be in this uphill struggle.

The only things she feels afterwards is his grip on her hand as it gets tighter. She feels him; his head turning slightly and then his lips buried in her hair, just resting on the top of her head.

Creeley shuts his eyes and it’s surprisingly easy after that to kill his father’s voice in his mind. It’s his turn to shed a few tears.

The only thing he wants to be certain of is that he’ll be nothing like him. That was the only promise he could make in this moment and, in turn, keep. The rest of it? He could tell her they would make it work, that they’d leave together, and that this child would have it good. Except in this moment, he would be lying. And he wasn’t going to lie.

He is not more distressed than usual. They’d leave together. At some point. He’d make that promise when he could see the way out for them, because it's what he _wants_  more than anything - he hadn't known it until she was packing that bag, and again when she told him.

For now, he wraps her up in his arms and holds her until they both fall back on the bed. She falls asleep first, tired out from the crying and feeling a strange safety here in his hold. Hesitantly, and more out of want then he had expected, he kisses the corner of her mouth and puts a hand on her stomach as though he is expecting to feel something. She stirs and tucks her head underneath his chin, and he kisses her forehead. To no one, he says;

“We’ll get out of here.”

**Author's Note:**

> this was requested by an anon over on my [writing tumblr](http://vnprofessional.tumblr.com/post/170775713926/bessie-and-creeley-im-pregnant) where i take requests and am hamming it up for damnation. i hope you like it, i sort of lost track of how to end it bc as much as i want them to Have It All and Be Happy Together Forever, i didn't give them that. so that's my own fault. sry
> 
> i listened to [beautiful undone by laura doggett](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMvMYSa_L0) while writing this, which is also where i got the title from.


End file.
